scatter joy!

is it me, or is the financial meltdown one big postmodern uh-oh?

like I said, I really don’t know much about finance, but it seems like the main problem was that these companies were playing around with risk in order to create “value.” instead of creating a product, an actual thing that had value, they claimed to be finding “value” in areas in which there previously was none, creating “value” in the abstract sense through new systems of lending.  as they reached higher and higher levels of abstraction, this “value,” it turns out, had no value at all.  or at the very least, it had much less value than we all predicted.

so here’s my question.  doesn’t this situation make perfect sense in the context of postmodernism?  postmodernism biggest claim to fame is the idea that meaning is relative, dynamic & destabilized.  postmodernism in art was about creating art that challenged the category of art, as it had been previously defined, rejecting formalism, authenticity, originality.  in literary theory, postmodernism seems to be about deconstructing language to the point where meaning is relative and unstable.  it’s all about interpretation, you might say.  if you think about postmodernism as applied to financial theories, then it becomes clear that the financial schemes these companies came up with were just an exercise in postmodernism. these companies were deconstructing the idea of “value” until it finally imploded.  there was nothing concrete, nothing black&white about it.  isn’t that the point of postmodernism?  to deconstruct until it’s all messy, destabilized, and turned upside down. 

so now what do we do?  how do we get ourselves out of this conceptual mess?